Pictures of Pictures explores the varied and ingenious means by which artists have invented new  images by reinventing old ones. Over half of the forty-five objects on view are drawn from the  Museum’s Department of Photographs, while others come from throughout the Museum’s  collections. Highlights include a fifteenth-century German engraving, paired with its contemporaneous copy in wooden relief, a trompe l’oeil engraving by Claude Mellan (1598–1688), in which a single spiraling line portrays the legendary veil that absorbed the image of Christ’s face  when he used the cloth to wipe his brow.

The exhibition casts fresh light on art of the postmodern era by linking works of overt appropriation to their historical ancestors. Sherrie Levine’s 1986 photograph of a Walker Evans portrait photograph  hangs beside Evans’s photograph of the picture packed window of a penny portrait studio in  Savannah, Georgia. West coast Pop artist Richard Pettibone contributes a canvas portraying Pop art  paintings that are, themselves, modeled on prior images, including Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 painting  of an art historian’s schematic diagram of a painting by Paul Cézanne. Vik Muniz’s photograph  Narcissus, After Caravaggio, from his series Pictures of Junk, renders the famous Baroque masterpiece in scrap metal, arranged on a white floor and viewed from above through a camera.  Here, set among meta-pictures from throughout history, even Caravaggio reveals himself as a maker  of pictures within-pictures; the young Narcissus, reflecting on his own reflection, presents the very image of a gallerygoer puzzling over the intricacies, and joys, of representation.

Joel Smith Curator of Photography